Mega-Lo-Mania

Mega-Lo-Mania is an early real-time strategy game that predates Dune II by a year. The player takes control of one of four gods: Scarlet (red), Caesar (green), Oberon (yellow) and Madcap (blue). There are no differences between them except colour and AI behaviour when opposing. Each level takes place on an island divided into two to sixteen "sectors". The objective is to defeat up to three opposing gods and conquer the island.

Before a level begins, the player decides which sector to place their first tower in, and how many men to deploy. The men can perform various tasks such as designing weapons and shields, mining elements, building structures, manufacturing weapons and forming an army. The number of men assigned to a single task determines how fast or effective it will be. Men that are left idle will procreate and gradually increase in number.

The Amiga and Atari ST versions of Mega-Lo-Mania, as developed by Sensible Software and published by Image Works, began development in November 1989, and were released in the Spring of 1991 for the Amiga and Atari ST; an MS-DOS version wasn't planned at this stage in development. In a January 1991 issue of British gaming magazine The One, The One interviewed team members from Sensible Software for information regarding Mega-Lo-Mania's development in a pre-release interview. Mega-Lo-Mania was originally conceived under the title Alien Empire and later My Little Warhead, but these names were scrapped in lieu of the final title of Mega-Lo-Mania. The game's original concept had the player taking the role of an operator of a spaceship who needed to combat robots located on an island, with the island being split into 16 sections.

The goal of this original design concept was to combine scrolling arcade action gameplay with real-time strategy; this concept is vastly different from the final product due to lack of publisher interest, as they considered the game to 'not fit into any specific category'. Jonathan Hare, Mega-Lo-Mania's graphic artist and one of its designers, expressed that the game was changed from its original concept to make it more marketable to publishers; he stated that the ultimatum became that the team needed to "drop the scrolling or drop the strategy", with the team deciding to scrap the game's arcade scrolling aspect. Upon scrapping the game's original concept of robots, the team considered a fantasy theme, but decided against it.

Mega-Lo-Mania is considered to be the first real time strategy game to also incorporate a technology tree and was met with universal acclaim on its original release. Amiga Power was impressed by the game, and considered it to be one of the best games for Amiga. Mega placed the game at #34 in their Top Mega Drive Games of All Time.

Conversions to other platforms sometimes received less praise. Computer Gaming World cited many bugs and flaws, and stated that even if they were fixed "not enough attention has been paid to gameplay". A 1994 survey of strategic space games set in the year 2000 and later gave the game two-plus stars out of five, stating that the Populous "clone ... offers a short diversion into strategic whimsy before degenerating into an also-ran".